Month: April 2021

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Duncan Hull / Getty)

A few years ago, Tesla was still a scrappy startup that sometimes teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Those days are over. The world's most valuable company now has $17 billion in cash in the bank and is currently building its third and fourth car factories—near Berlin and Austin, Texas, respectively.

On Monday, Tesla released its financial results for the first quarter of 2021, and they were the company's best numbers yet. The electric carmaker reported net earnings of $438 million on a GAAP basis. Revenues were $10.4 billion. That number is down slightly from the fourth quarter's record figure of $10.7 billion, but it's up more than 70 percent from a year earlier.

Despite the record profit and near-record revenues, Wall Street wasn't impressed. Tesla's stock lost more than 3 percent of its value in morning trading.

Enlarge / A wild beaver works furiously in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. (credit: Getty Images | Jeff R Clow)

About 900 Internet users in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, lost service for 36 hours when beavers chewed through an underground fiber cable in what network operator Telus called a "very bizarre and uniquely Canadian turn of events."

"Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations," the statement from Telus said, according to a CBC article posted Sunday.

The beavers apparently used some of the Telus materials to build their dam. Photos of the dam and damage to the cable can be seen in this CBS News article.

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  Ford will spend $185 million on a new 200,000-square-foot "battery center of excellence" called Ion Park in Michigan. It will join Ford's new Battery Benchmarking and Test Laboratory in Allen Park, Michigan, seen here. [credit: Ford ]

The Ford Motor Company announced on Tuesday that it is creating a new "global battery center of excellence," called Ion Park, in southeast Michigan. Ford says the new facility will work on all aspects of battery technology development, including manufacturing, mining, and recycling, as the automaker looks to a future in which its electric vehicle battery packs are more vertically integrated.

Ford says Ion Park will have a team of 150 once it's fully operational late next year. It will join Ford's new Battery Benchmarking and Test Laboratory in Allen Park, Michigan. That site, which opened in 2020, is where the company tests new battery cell types, similar to the Volvo lab we visited early last year.

Ford says it has already tested more than 150 cells to understand different chemistries and operating conditions at Allen Park.